After Walden

Henry David Thoreau left Walden, but in a way you carry that experience around with you. He stayed with the Emerson family while Waldo traveled to Europe to do lectures. Such an odd thing to step in and be the male role model and leader in another family temporarily, but it makes sense in a way.

We know what happened to Thoreau during this period because he wrote letters to Emerson.

Sophia Foord (1802-1885) proposed marriage to Henry. A 45 year old women who taught Emerson's children for a year, when Henry was 30. She had lived with the Alcott's. Henry declined the offer. She sent him semi-incoherent letters and saw herself as his soulmate, they would be united in heaven.

Amos Bronson Alcott was hired to build a structure, maybe thought to be a writers place, but it was too ramshackled. It's speculated that it was a way to give Alcott and Thoreau money for Emerson. A quixotic project they seemed to work on for a while that never quite came off. 

The Walden home was moved, and it was almost a new home until the gardener fought with his wife and left, and the rebuild languished. Then it was moved again and then later scrapped for parts, and you could say some boards still exist in a barn in the area.

The railroad sparks kept setting fire to Emerson's land, at Walden and by his home. They fire burned woods would eventually be clear cut, and Thoreau's Walden would be gone.

Emerson's (second) wife Lidian got sick. Emerson was worried but took a side trip to Paris in time for the 1848 revolution. Meanwhile Margaret Fuller was writing about the revolutions in Rome. Emerson wanted to rescue her, but she was married and with child. Lidian recovered, and resumed writing letters abroad to Emerson. With such an intimate relationship, one wonders what it was like for Lidian and Henry. 

We have no information about Thoreau's sexual life, was he gay or bi or asexual? Was sexuality so cut off in these times? As a naturalist, he saw it all as natural, he wrote some things Walt Whitman would approve of in his journal. But the trail goes dead and we just don't know.